print January 2014

Heimrad Bäcker

Visitors walking into the MCA Denver’s Heimrad Bäcker exhibition might mistake it for a group show. With black-and-white photographs, floor-based sculptures, an austere group of prints, and fourteen issues of the journal neue texte, the various components do not immediately suggest the output of a single artist. Little known outside German-speaking countries, Bäcker (1925–2003) produced this complex body of work in two distinct historical phases: first, during World War II as a committed member of the Hitler Youth and the Nazi Party, then after 1968 as a photographer, writer, and editor working

print December 2013

Jack Whitten

A visible presence among New York painters since the mid-1960s, Jack Whitten has recently received a surge of attention. Within the past couple of years, his work has been featured in multiple solo gallery shows and major group exhibitions such as “The Encyclopedic Palace” in Venice and “Blues for Smoke” at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles—not to mention on the cover of this magazine in February 2012—and a retrospective, scheduled for the fall of 2014, is currently in preparation at the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego. The theme of rediscovery continues at the Rose

print September 2013

Tony Feher

In the early 1990s, Tony Feher became known, along with contemporaries such as Felix Gonzalez-Torres and Gabriel Orozco, for rearranging common materials into poetic configurations. Extending the tradition of the readymade into a sculptural sensibility privileging tactile and temporal engagements with ordinary things, Feher struck a balance between allowing his found elements to retain their objecthood, and transforming their individual qualities. Presenting more than twenty-five years of work, this survey establishes Feher as an important figure in the transition between Minimalist industrial

print November 2012

Derrick Adams

Situated within a performing-arts complex, Derrick Adams’s exhibition “The World According to Derrick: Performative Objects in Formation” synced nicely with its surroundings. The show, organized by art historian (and Artforum contributor) Nuit Banai, tracked more than a decade of the New York–based artist’s production, dating back to his student days. From the beginning, Adams has invested his work with a high degree of performativity, though to call him a performance artist would be too limiting. Rather, he fluidly traverses the categorical distinctions typically drawn between performance and

previews September 2006

Juan Muñoz

Five years after Juan Muñoz’s premature death at age forty-eight, this survey will allow viewers to judge how well sculptural illusionism holds up in the present.

Juan Muñoz once claimed that his figurative sculptures stand in opposition to Frank Stella’s what-you-see-is-what-you-see approach to painting. For the Spanish artist, sculpture need not be at odds with painting’s centuries-old drive to trick the eye. Yet despite the obvious differences between the two media, Muñoz’s signature assemblies of grinning and gesturing people force a navigation of space that creates an unexpected dialogue with Minimalism. Five years after the artist’s premature death at age forty-eight, this survey will allow viewers to

print September 2005

Georg Herold

Among the West German artists who came into prominence in the ’80s, Georg Herold somehow missed out on the international notoriety of his friends and occasional collaborators Martin Kippenberger and Albert Oehlen. Until now, no exhibition has covered Herold’s entire career in depth. Though this traveling retrospective happily corrects the oversight, it is disappointing that it won’t be seen outside the German-speaking countries; Herold deserves a bigger audience.

Like many established German artists, Herold grew up in the East and made his reputation in the West, having studied art on both sides

print January 2005

“Funky Lessons”

Whenever anyone headed toward the exit during the daily run of “Funky Lessons,” a young woman startled visitors by melodramatically swooning at their feet and, with a faraway gaze, uttering a few cryptic words before quickly rising and returning to the reception desk. She spoke in a monotone of moving “beyond the cul-de-sac of a false choice between harmless hermeticism and patronizing gestures,” a dichotomy that formed the premise of this show organized by German critic and Frieze editor Jörg Heiser. Lifting lines from the show’s press release, Tino Sehgal arranged for the impromptu performances

print March 2004

Nils Norman

The clear message of social and political critique once projected by Nils Norman’s work has become opaque in his latest computer-based pictures. Gone is the diagrammatic approach in which well-organized groups of images are directly accompanied by concise, often humorous texts elucidating the artist’s position on the urban environment’s present failings and future potential. His new ink-jet prints on coated Alu-Dibond panels are still generated with Illustrator, his preferred software program, but the pictorial elements now float, unmoored and relatively decontextualized, against lush red

news February 2004

Documenta 12 curator Roger M. Buergel

AMID ALL THE FRENZIED speculation surrounding the selection of the next Documenta curator, Roger M. Buergel probably didn’t top many lists of potential candidates. Although known and respected throughout much of the German-speaking art world, he only began to organize relatively sizable exhibitions within the past four years. Moderate recognition in the United States came in late 2002, when the Menil Collection in Houston named Buergel the first recipient of its Walter Hopps Award for Curatorial Achievement. Yet his lack of renown in the States, coupled with the award’s newness, made it a

previews January 2004

3rd Berlin Biennial for Contemporary Art

The high expectations for a flourishing gallery scene that accompanied Berlin’s inaugural biennial in 1998 have since been tempered by a stubbornly stagnant economy. Despite the setbacks, the city’s relatively unpolished, do-it-yourself approach makes it a key site of European art production, if not always consumption.

The high expectations for a flourishing gallery scene that accompanied Berlin’s inaugural biennial in 1998 have since been tempered by a stubbornly stagnant economy. Despite the setbacks, the city’s relatively unpolished, do-it-yourself approach makes it a key site of European art production, if not always consumption. The artistic director for this third biennial, Ute Meta Bauer (a member of the Documenta 11 team), has invited five guest curators and roughly forty-five artists to address what she calls thematic “hubs”—Urban Conditions, Sonic Scapes, Migration, Fashions

print November 2003

“Grotesque!”

The average person might not immediately associate the Germanic sensibility with a propensity to laugh, but that was precisely Charles Baudelaire’s argument in the 1850s when he singled out Germany as a nation where “all is weighty, profound and excessive” and which was therefore particularly suited to the grotesque, a genre that, he said admiringly, inspires “immediate laughter.” Featuring work by a wide variety of modern and contemporary German-speaking artists, from Arnold Böcklin to John Bock, “Grotesque! 130 Years of Witty Art” put the poet’s theory to the test. Clearly, the mode of grotesque

print October 2003

“Exhibitions of an Exhibition”

When Swiss curator Hans-Ulrich Obrist began organizing exhibitions in the early ’90s, his clear point of reference was the ’60s and ’70s, in terms of both content and his own persona, which drew on Harald Szeemann’s transformation of the curator into an auteur. Whatever one thought of shows like Obrist’s “Do it”—which self-consciously revived Fluxus-era instruction-based projects—he never hid his historical debts. By contrast, Obrist’s less rigorous followers—and they are many—thrive on the knowledge that current curatorial practice is a voracious and permissive beast and allows for greatly

Gregory Williams